Over the past few months there has been much discussion in the media about the Queensland government’s plan to "privatise" and sell off the states “assets”. The public assets that are still yet to be sold are the Port of Brisbane lease, Queensland Motorways lease and the Abbot Point Coal Terminal lease. Queensland Rail National has launched its share pre-sale registration, but the share offering has not yet been made.

The largest outcry against the governments proposals comes from the special interest groups that will be directly affected.  Naturally the loudest and most vocally organised are the unions. They're mad as hell but sadly, for all the wrong reasons.

The intuitive concerns voiced by the public are often well placed. They sense something is not right about this whole process but unfortunately guided by a public debate that offers only false choices, who can really fault them for falling into the trap of blaming the market as the mechanism that will fail, as opposed to government and state intervention which already has. As pointed out in this article, the general concern from the public appears to be that “[they] are already deeply suspicious about privatisations after electricity asset sales led to higher retail prices.”

This article was excerpted from Part I of The Discovery of Freedom.

Contents:

• The Pagan Faith
• Communism
• The Living Authorities
• The Planned Economies
• War
   

The Pagan Faith

Very few men have ever known that men are free. Among this earth's population now, few know that fact.

For six thousand years at least, a majority has generally believed in pagan gods. A pagan god, whatever it is called, is an Authority which (men believe) controls the energy, the acts, and therefore the fate of all individuals.

The pagan view of the universe is that it is static, motionless, limited, and controlled by an Authority. The pagan view of man is that all individuals are, and by their nature should and must be, controlled by some Authority outside themselves.

Everyone has this belief when he is very young. A chick can scratch as soon as it is dry from the shell, and a fish emerging from the egg can swim, but a baby must be spanked before he can breathe, and then he cannot control the little energy that he has. For a long time, he will kick himself in the eye when he is only trying to taste his toes to find out what they are.

Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions that ranged from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and violent assault.

When people bothered to give reasons for opposing the proposed abolition, they advanced many different ideas. In the first column of the accompanying table, I list ten such ideas that I have encountered in my reading. At one time, countless people found one or more of these reasons an adequate ground on which to oppose the abolition of slavery.

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer – except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.

~ George Orwell, Animal Farm

The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you've always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

Sometimes government functionaries and their private-sector supporters want simply to bully you, to dictate what you must do and what you must not do, regardless of whether anybody benefits from your compliance with these senseless, malicious directives. The drug laws are the best current example, among many others, of the government as bully. Our rulers presently enforce a host of laws that combine the worst aspects of puritanical priggishness and the invasive, pseudo-scientific, therapeutic state. They tolerate our pursuit of happiness only so long as we pursue it exclusively in officially approved ways: gin, yes; weed, no.

Notwithstanding the great delight that our rulers take in tormenting us with their absurdly inconsistent nanny-state commands, they generally have bigger fish to fry. Above all, the government and its special-interest backers want to take our money. If these people ran a store, they might aptly call it Robberies R Us. Their credo is simple and brazen: "you have money, and we want it."

"Thou shalt not steal" is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.

We are all taught very early to respect what belongs to others: "Don't take your sister's toy away from her," your mother admonished, punishing you if you persisted in your toddler's larceny. By the time you were three years old, you understood the difference between mine and thine. If you didn't take the lesson to heart and persisted beyond your childhood years in treating everybody's property as something for you to take, so long as you could get away with it, then you were viewed as a sociopath, an enemy of decency and of civilization itself.

Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.

When the government has only recently placed itself in a position of domination over a group of people, the people recognize full well that the government's taking amounts to looting. They pony up only because they are given the stark choice of "your money or your life," and they want to go on living.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of F.A. Harper’s 1949 Liberty: A Path to its Recovery

It is generally accepted that a government can enslave the citizens. Enough Kings and Emperors and Generalissimos and Fuhrers have done so to establish that fact quite conclusively. But the belief prevails that: "It is impossible for liberty to be lost under a democratic form of government. Democracy assures that the will of the people shall prevail, and that is liberty. So long as democracy is preserved we can rest assured that liberty will be continued to the full." The more a person leans on an unsure support the more certain he is to fall. Edmund Burke observed that people never give up their liberties except under some delusion.

Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty. Willis Ballinger's study of eight great democracies of the past -ancient Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, the First and Third Republics of France, Weimar Germany and Italy - reveals how unreliable is this hope. He reports that liberty perished peacefully by vote of the people in five of the eight countries; that in two of them it was lost by violence; that in one of them a dictatorship was established through the buying of the legislature by a fraudulent clique. One who would understand the problem of liberty must understand why it is possible for liberty to be lost even in a democracy, and how to guard against it.

This work was originally presented as an address before the Mont Pelerin Society at St. Moritz, Switzerland, on September 4, 1957.

There are times when one’s humility seems to go on vacation, as it did, for me when Profes­sor Hayek proposed: tackling this topic for dis­cussion. Then later when reality returned to plague the victim, there ended a beautiful, balmy sense of well-being during which all had seemed perfectly clear and simple; during which the topic of liberty—its meaning and philosophic base—posed no apparent problem of a serious nature; during which, at first blush, it seemed almost trite to presume to dwell on the obvious.

But is the meaning of liberty so clear and simple?

Were a stranger to observe the nature of the Mont Pelerin Society and note its convening for this decennial occasion, would he not be surprised to find us devoting an entire session to the meaning of liberty—the word perhaps more basic than any other to the original purpose of the Society? Might he not expect this to have been a matter resolved with essentially unanimous agreement at the outset of our Societal associa­tion together? The fact that it has not been thus resolved seems to me to reflect the lack of any clear agreement as to the meaning of liberty; apparently it is something not so clear and simple. We use this beloved word in our communication with one another and assume an understanding that apparently is not there.

 I wish some one would offer a prize—not of a hundred francs, but of a million, with crowns, medals and ribbons—for a good, simple and intelligible definition of the word "Government."

What an immense service it would confer on society!

The Government! what is it? where is it? what does it do? what ought it to do? All we know is, that it is a mysterious personage; and, assuredly, it is the most solicited, the most tormented, the most overwhelmed, the most admired, the most accused, the most invoked, and the most provoked, of any personage in the world.

I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader, but I would stake ten to one, that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to Government for the realization of them.

And should the reader happen to be a lady, I have no doubt that she is sincerely desirous of seeing all the evils of suffering humanity remedied, and that she thinks this might easily be done, if Government would only undertake it.

But, alas! that poor unfortunate personage, like Figaro, knows not to whom to listen, nor where to turn. The hundred thousand mouths of the press and of the platform cry out all at once: